How 'Affordable Housing' Can Be Made Into Very Good Entertainment
Thoughts on the HBO mini-series “Show Me A Hero"
by framersqool:
There are two basic problems with extremely well-done propaganda. One, is that it is extremely well-done. The other, is that it is propaganda. Owing to the former, it is all too easy to overlook the latter, in other words.
Here we have a thoughtful, compelling, well-acted human drama about some really nice people, and the whole thing could easily be taken just as entertainment rather than as the carefully crafted infomercial for paternalistic social engineering by an all-knowing federal regime that it is.
Public housing really is the human calamity its opponents in the story here said it was going to be. Making it more pretty on the outside or mixing it in among "nice" neighborhoods does nothing to mitigate the corruption, vice, crime and especially untenable family life that it breeds.
Only near the end of these six episodes does the script actually touch briefly on a valid point about the real effects of these socialist warehousing projects, when it is pointed out in passing that most of the residents of these comfortable prisons are single women with children, who would lose their eligibility for the programs if the authorities ever found out there was a man in their house. This alone is probably the single most catastrophic consequence of the laws and regulations and agencies which oversee this massive undertaking to keep the slaves on the plantation: that men, as husbands, fathers of children and legitimate heads of households, are basically just in the way. The conditions for securing and then keeping these units work the same way as any other welfare program, which is that one is essentially punished for one's life situation becoming better, and so anyone who has such a home at public expense has every incentive to sustain the illusion of their "underprivileged" status or else be kicked out.
I worked for a public housing agency myself for a short time, and the phenomenon of the Invisible Man in these households was one of the constants. Not only do all the benefits of such programs go primarily to women, so does the status as a real parent and adult and citizen, since the man of the house's very existence is at best an open secret and at worst an act of fraud that has the whole family thrown out in the street.
Whatever other illusory and entirely cosmetic benefit to society these rowhouses may have brought, their primary effect has been to erase the relevance of manhood and fatherhood as an unnecessary and even criminal nuisance. As is made clear from the interviews and comments in the episode reviews after each segment from the production people, this show was done within a certain ideological and sociopolitical framework by true believers in these "theories" about how best to box up poor people to keep them out of the way, and they present the idea of a federal judge threatening to jail city council members for not voting the way they are ordered to as right and good and moral.
Naturally none of the production people would want to raise their own families in such a setting, but as always, the supercilious moralism of middle-class armchair socialists such as the movie industry is made up of assumes that what they think is best for their inferiors really is best for them whether it is or not. But gosh, it sure is a well-made TV show. If I didn't know better I would not have even noticed what a piece of liberal-progressive standard-issue agitprop it is.
framersqool
Thoughts from an aging bachelor of no particular consequence who is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
Thanks as always to our host Clayton for posting this item, which falls neatly into place amid an ongoing discussion we've had on the nature of 'social realism' in entertainment products.
This also serves as a sort of bookend, to an economic reality I have long recognized as the underlying hypocrisy and duplicity attending all attempts to better one's lot within the vast system of fiscal activity we know as American life.
On this end, one must undertake to deceive the public sector on the nature of one's 'poverty' in order to cash in on its largesse, or simply to prevent it from digging too deep in one's pockets. But on the other end, if one is to secure the benefits to be found from the financial industry (also known erroneously as 'the private sector'), one is at pains to exaggerate the extent of one's wealth.
A simple way to express this permanent conundrum might be:
Tell one set of lies to 'the government' to keep what you got, tell another to the bankers to try and get more.
My reading of the financial crisis of 2008-09 is simply that it turned out a whole lot of folks had been telling this latter sort of lies for quite some time already, using the financial industry as a kind of source of low-hanging fruit because the bankers hadn't been all that concerned with whether or not a whole lot of incoming applicants for their services had been telling the truth. The results of this particular Big Lie coming into the light were, by some accounts, catastrophic.
I have no doubt at all that some overwhelming majority of those who had lied to the banks to 'buy' a house were also in the habit of lying to various official bodies to try and keep it.
Or as Credence Clearwater had once so eloquently put it:
'But when the Tax Man come to the door,
ooh, the house look like a rummage sale, y'all....'
There is a lot of talk in current circulation in which the term 'corruption' is most often asserted as self-defining, but in which the specific nature of what exactly this corruption consists of is rarely mentioned. For my own purposes, one can readily begin to identify what actions on anyone's part might be accurately described as 'corrupt', based primarily on the question of who is trying to cook which set of books in order to deceive whom:: they are either seeking to exaggerate their assets in order to acquire more assets, or they are trying to conceal their existing assets in order to keep them.
Or both (!), as I suspect is most often the case.
To the extent that either public- or private-sector shenanigans may be defined as 'corrupt', sooner or later the presence of the one kind of deceit, or the other, or both, must be acknowledged.
If you really want to know why it is that so many Americans can live so well but with no visible indication of what so many of those in our midst had ever done to secure such much-envied status, I'd say look for 'both.'
You're sure to find them, especially in the realm of this 'affordable housing' racket: while one set of liars calling themselves 'contractors' is allowed to profit from building sub-standard structures and then pocketing the further profits to be extracted from systematically neglecting to maintain them, another set of liars is pretending to be more poor than they really are in order to move in, whereupon they go right out and apply for high-limit credit cards and loans to buy brand-new cars, just before they sit down to fill out their 'tax returns' and go back to pretending to be so poor they need the government to give them a free house.